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Bill : Hello, welcome to soft land Central, the home for market entry, so today we’re going to talk about language and localization. Fantastic topic and it’s just a pleasure to welcome our guests. Wendy Pease from report international welcome Wendy. Thank you.
Wendy : Thank you. It’s great to be here. Well, my fake boat
Bill : So I’m so jealous. It’s warm where I am, It’s humid, and I’m enjoying your boat with you vicariously here on a Friday afternoon. So we’re going to talk about language localization and, you know, certainly our audience are, you know, companies that are looking to enter new markets and and and also the organizations that support them. And so I think what would be helpful before we hop dive into the topic is if we learn a little bit more about you and so can you tell us a little bit about your background first and then and then after that maybe report International.
Wendy : Yeah, sure. I was. I was born in central Pennsylvania so I’m a country girl at heart, and then my dad was an international agriculture so we actually lived in Mexico for my first and second grade where I went half Spanish half English speaking school. And then we went to the Philippines for about six months, and then we were on to Taiwan where I went to third and fourth grade. So where we lived in Taiwan was a new agriculture center, the small farming town that was there had never seen white kids. So they wanted to touch my hair and skin and my brothers, and we didn’t understand a lick of Chinese so I really had that feeling of never understanding. And I also got the love for travel and language and culture and diversity and getting to know new people. I mean my kids know that weird is a compliment, not a criticism because it’s just somebody different. So I’ve always loved that and about 16 years ago, I was looking for a new opportunity wanted to have my own business, and came across this all translation company for sale, and she had run it for 17 years were over 30 years now, and it was very Lisa Gavigan was ready to move on to something new. And so the stars aligned and I became owner of rapport International, and we provide high quality language services so it’s anything from written across any of the technologies that can be videos and then anything through the spoken so we do in person telephone video and then we’ve had more requests for simultaneous conference interpreters online recently. So anything that needs high quality, that’s what we’re about.
Bill : Yeah, fantastic. And so, hopping into our topic. You know, I guess, you know, as I think of the hierarchy of focus here in terms of, you know, how a company might move forward. You know what, what’s the importance of having an internationalization, or I’m sorry, a language strategy as a company when you’re looking to internationalize what’s the sort of importance of that language strategy.
Wendy : Well, 95% of the people who even if they’re bilingual and they speak English would much prefer to be on a website in their native language. Over 70% are going to spend more time. Over 72% are more apt to buy something, and 50% will spend more money if they’re visiting a site that’s translated into their language. So, all the research shows that it is well worth translating your site and not living under the myth that English is the global language,
Bill : Which, oh, so it means essentially more business, more revenue, if you’re, if you’re speaking to somebody in their language. It says, I’ll share with you just a quick story I’d love your reaction to, so I only know English I am exceptionally ignorant. And so but I travel a lot, I go internationally a lot so when I go to a restaurant in another country that is non English as a, as a base language. You know I’m out to dinner and I’m doing my best to order a meal and. And so if I’m not understood, I immediately reveal my ignorance by speaking louder, and thinking, thinking that that’s the same as actually speaking the language of the person. And so, you know, I think that to me that just seems like a metaphor for the way a lot of companies, even politicians, communicate now right is, so I don’t know your language I don’t know your, you know how to appropriately address you, so I’m going to I’m going to use whatever language I have to just bludgeon you.
Wendy : And you know that’s not just an American thing. I was out in California years ago and there was a guy out there at a coffee shop going Zuko Zuko Zuko. I like to relate him like sugar. Guy grin really big. You know that frustration when you’re trying to get your meeting across.
Bill : If brutal So, but that’s it seems like a really good transition to talking about localization so you know there’s that sort of literal translation of the language. Tell us about, about localization and sort of how that works and how a company might use localization to their benefit.
Wendy : Okay, so how do you define localization because that’s interesting outside the industry, and across different industries,
Bill : What I mean. So when I think of localization, it means, you know, You can speak English well, is, I mean just even in a broad sense is that British English, is that US English is that Texas English, you know, is it California English I mean I think there are different flavors and certainly as I travel, you know, I know there are different, different dialects of Hindu and different words that are used in India in different areas of India as an example. So, I guess when I think about localization, it’s, It’s, it’s understanding the meaning and communicating to somebody in a way that they relate to whatever, I guess, to me that that means words and tone, and it could even be colors that, that don’t offend, and or the compliment in some way. But I think it’s, it’s, it’s one of empathic communication, if I were going to put it in a couple of words.
Wendy : Yeah that’s a good way to say, Yeah, so the reason I asked that, is that that is one definition of localization. It’s one we use frequently is the comparison between globalization and localization. So if you have a company, you know, who makes soccer balls with Adidas. Okay, we’ll use the Adidas soccer balls. If you’re selling Adidas soccer balls here in the United States, you’re going to put different sports figures around that, and different flags and different looking people around that and you’re going to use different references, than if you were selling Adidas soccer balls in Italy or Peru, so that those kind of products really need to be localized in your definition of the localization. Another term is globalization, which means you do one translation, and that’s going to be good for the globe. So, for example, we worked with context Snoke or we work with them to do their marketing translation. We just did their website, and they’re a great company. They do packaging. They’re selling around the world. They only have certain products that they’re selling in each country so it was quite a process to go through and they can globalize so they could use one good Spanish, that would cross all the Spanish speaking markets because they’re doing an industrial sale. Okay, so that’s the localize on your definition the globalization. Now if you get into the technology or gaming industry and use the word localization. That means, actually, taking, taking the code, and taking the words out and dropping them in within the midst of the code so it will work with the technology.
So rather than getting hung up on the terms when we’re working with clients, we have a you know I kind of laugh because we show our, our Features page about all the things that we do somebody sighs would kind of go bonkers and Googling out on it. And so we never show that what we do is we start with, what are your goals, what are you trying to accomplish, and then we can help them figure out how to get to reach those goals whether it’s localization globalization, whatever.
Bill : So I suppose a really simple example of localizing taking your Adidas example is if you were in, you said Italy or Peru, it would be a football. And if you were in the US, it would be a soccer ball right, just that, it’s so it’s, it could be any of the supporting artwork, it could be the terminology or words used, but it’s, it’s really, it sounds like aligning with that the way communication is done in that local in that local market.
Wendy : Yeah, so we could the taglines for staples, and their I think they’ve changed it since then too, but it was make more happen, and you could take them more out, and you could put in make creativity happen or make fast happen or you know whatever you wanted to sub in and one of the things I love this example is make refrigerator art happen. So I think I’ve talked to you about this before is, you know what refrigerator art is.
Bill : Yeah, sure. Good.
Wendy : What is it,
Bill : isn’t it the art that goes on the refrigerator that little kids do.
Wendy : Yeah, Yeah, that’s like your art gallery. Yeah, well, in, in France, they don’t do that because the refrigerators just for keeping food cold, so make refrigerator art happen as a tagline wouldn’t work in France so our French translator came back and told us that and we worked with them to it they decided not to do another campaign around that just not to use that one in France. So that would be localizing what the content is going to say,
Bill : That makes sense.
Wendy : Oh yeah and colors you talked about colors. Yeah, I mean, white here means wedding and China, it means death. So there’s all sorts of colors and images. I mean I used to have a picture, this magazine I kept it for years. It was the black minority enter enterprise magazine, and on the back. A big insurance company had a picture of a lily white family hanging out of the car waving and I was like, come on, you’re gonna offend people with this. It’s not just not gonna make them feel warm but you’re gonna offend, so hopefully they’ve gotten better. I don’t want to name them.
Bill : Yeah we want out them here. So, um, so thinking about, you know some of these mistakes you’re talking about , what are the most common mistakes that you see companies make when they’re looking to enter new markets, in terms of communication, Google translate, Translate, Google Translate. Why why is what’s what’s the, why doesn’t that work.
Wendy : Okay, so here’s one of my favorites. If you want to translate the word crisis. Okay. Word on the street and the you know is that it really means danger opportunity. Well, it, the characters don’t mean that the literal characters mean danger, change, point, which I think captures it so much more, but we’d never say the words, danger, change, point here, you need a very qualified interpreter who understands the language to go crisis. This is what it means or look at those characters and know that the English word is crisis. So you can see the the rumor mill started up that danger opportunity. Got caught somehow in the media now it’s used as, you know, a motivational thing and leadership so I decided to play around with it on Google and take each of those characters and put them in, and what I got back was the first character meant critical, and the second character meant machine. So crisis means critical machine translation, yeah, yeah. One was the tagline for Mazda, in, in Japan was jimba, eta. So you think about, I may have told you this one before. No, but to your, your horse warrior. So you’re a warrior old fashioned Japanese warrior riding on a horse you’ve got your bow and your arrow, you’re one with the horse, you’re soaring across the plane, you are feeling connected, you are feeling on fire so driving a car like that is cool, right. Well, it came over here and it translated if you know if you popped it into Google Translate it said, danger, no, no, No, it wouldn’t be so I see all sorts of issues like this with Google Translate so that’s one and just the pure quality doesn’t work. The second thing is that I see all the time and it’s driving me nuts as people put the Google Translate plugin on their website, and then they figure that they’re meeting all the liar is a liability requirements like in the government, they have to provide in language services, and then they burry the. So the first is, they’ve got a quality problem so it’s only a matter of time before they run into something like that. The second problem is is they bury it so the navigation is so far down so imagine you go to a Chinese website, and you don’t understand it but you go I’ll get the gist. Where’s the Google Translate plugin. You can’t even find it if you’re looking for it because it’s buried so far under, and then the problem is you click on the Google Translate plugin if you find it in the language isn’t translated. So I see the plug in all the time where you have all the languages listed in English and if I spoke Chinese I’d never know which one to pick. So that’s the second problem the navigation. The third problem is, it can cause problems with your search engine optimization, because if you figure duplicate content causes a problem with optimization and where to put it and Google dings you for it. If you put it up there, and Google translates it, it’s basically showing us the same content. So we’ve worked with so many companies about getting the Google Translate plugin off of there, and then thinking through what they want their buyers journey to be. And starting with a budget, so they have fewer pages, not their whole website, they see what blogs are doing really well, they’re using all the metrics to continue their translation from there. So that’s the number one problem.
Bill : Cool. And, and so okay so Google Translate. Number one, what other mistakes do companies make
Wendy : shopping on price. No, it’s a common question we get is what’s your per word price. And I’m like okay I can’t tell you our per word price but we did a full research, analysis, and we found out that we’re midline in the price. So, some of the competitors, what they do is they will put a low per word price, and then they’ll add on for project management, quality assurance, editing, you know everything else we come with a fully bundle price so you know shopping on price that way. And the second is, along with this is hiring the wrong agency. It used to be that an agency was an agency and things weren’t, you know, some a, they just they all did language and if they had a way to screen the translators, then they could provide good enough. But what we’re hearing from you know like over the month I had two clients come to us who had gone through multiple agencies and the quality wasn’t there. I’ve heard other new clients that come to us because they didn’t get it back on time. There’s another agency out there that’s really cheap, they’re like the Uber of agencies, works really well for like an Amazon, that just has tons of content, it’s technical, it’s changing a lot. They want to get it in they want to get it out, and they put it up on a platform, there’s no confidentiality and there’s some question about quality because of the review and you’ve got no linguistic matchmaking so if somebody has written the content, you know, it’s like a writer. If somebody writes it and they keep working with you, they get more and more knowledge and so it gets easier for them to write and their message gets refined. So there’s a place in here for all these different agencies, you just have to make sure you’re using the right one.
Bill : Thanks, everybody has their strengths, or hypose Yep, yep. And so Google, and then shopping on price, what are the mistakes.
Wendy : I’m using the wrong translator, so they don’t use Google Translate. Oftentimes they’ll go to a friend or family. Right you speak Spanish, I speak Spanish. Yeah, can’t you do the translation well, they’re actually translation degrees and there are people that get that specialize in this and interpreters are much different. If you’ve got somebody who’s an interpreter it’s somebody who likes to run around all day and talk to people and help people, translators are more brainy, they like to sit behind the computer, they quote dictionaries at me and they’re grammar freaks. So right there, they’re too alone. So we had an example of a company that sent us over something they know I know what it was. We did the translation, and then they had an internal person do the review and the edits that they made, change the message of what was getting across. And so we went back to the person who hired us and we said, you know, the message here is changed and this is what it says now and she’s like, Oh, that’s not what I want it to say, there was a political issue about who had done the translation. So we spent more time making sure that the grammar was correct and that the message was, was culturally appropriate, but she knew that was her quality check to actually know what it said, and that it didn’t match the English, but that’s how she could get her comfort level lever level, because that’s that’s another good question was what is the biggest fear of getting translation. And that is the inability to control the quality, and so that’s why we’ve spent years figuring out, and offering 100% guarantee on quality.
Bill : That’s fantastic. And so going back to Google as a source of translation, what are the alternatives what, what’s the best alternative to sort of not using Google.
Wendy : So I just, I’m in the middle of writing, I’m past halfway actually writing the first the first Manuscript of the Book on global marketing, and I just finished the chapter on who can do your translations so cheapest and worse to quality, more money, you’d start with Google translator, then you’d go to, probably a friend or family because they’re not going to be professionally trained and you don’t know if they’re fully bilingual, and the two languages. If you go to win, you know, an online sourcing platform to get an individual or an individual translator. That’s probably the next step up it will be a little bit more expensive but you don’t know the quality because we don’t even look at industry certification as good enough quality. We take them through a whole process to get tested to make sure they’re good enough quality so any individual that says, they’re a trained interpreter for quality,
you got,
you know you got to check that out. So individuals, community groups, I’d be real careful of because we did something for the state and they took our translation they ran it through the community group the community group came back and they said well it just doesn’t sound right that way but they changed, they wanted it more colloquial, so it was how you’d speak but if it’s coming if it’s document coming from the state and it has to be perfectly grammatically correct. And then the last is to go to an agency, you know, and then figuring out which agency, because the agency is going to have somebody that runs the project for you they’re going to have relationships with the translators and interpreters, they’re going to know who specializes in what area because it’s not just, I mean we’ve got people that do patent translations on chemical processes, that’s going to be a different person than somebody who does your marketing translation.
Bill : Right. And it must be, I mean just thinking in reporting International where you’ve been around for 33 years. There weren’t websites 33 years ago, and just thinking of how the market has changed in the time now even since you’ve owned the business, you know, now even the smallest business pretty much has a website and, and more people are internationalizing, how have you seen that change, the, the types of customers you’re working with and kind of what their expectations are.
Wendy : Oh it’s been fascinating 16 years that I’ve been here because when I bought the company, there was no CRM, there was no website and she didn’t have the energy to take it to that next level. She had Rolodex cards, you know, which is how we all used to keep our information, but she used to have to FedEx everything out and hardcopy for proofs. Wow. Yeah, so she had, I mean she had email and she had gone electronic so it wasn’t, I mean she wasn’t afraid of technology, she did it. She just was tired of running the business. So then, a few years into that Google Translate came in, you know, which was the machine translation. And everybody said, oh that’s gonna put you out of business. So you know the industry went through a little bit of panic over that but, you know, about five years later turned around and said okay, that’s, that’s fine, it has only elevated the understanding of the need for translation. Then, AI came out with neural machine translation so this was supposed to be even smarter and do better. And I was very happy to hear on an industry conference just this week of venture capitalists who is investing in the industry said it is not a worry right now he says you know as venture capitalists, we’re looking forward to, you know, technology that could really disrupt the industry and he said it’s not there. They’re there yet. And part of the reason is there, there’s about 3000 words a year that are added into the dictionary. So if you think about selfie or Zoom fatigue or I heard one the other day a Dharti. I don’t think this is in there yet, Dharti is a day partie
Bill : Dharti right now
Wendy : on the boat. Yeah, so if you think about all the new words that are taken in and then what you were talking earlier, is if we talk here from the northeast, it’s very different from Texas, it’s very different from London. And so, all those new, you know like languages just continually changing. So that’s, that’s been one change the second change is for all the companies that export. It used to be if you wanted to export, you would go, oftentimes you’d start in another English speaking countries, start with Canada and then you might go to your, the UK and then you might go to Australia or Singapore or Hong Kong, but, um, what’s changed in that is, and I’m seeing it now since COVID came up, is that people are spending more time online, they want to buy online. So you’ve got this whole generation of companies that are called accidental exporters’. And so, if people are watching their social media carefully, if they start seeing a lot of inquiries, either from their metrics or from what they’re seeing come internal, they can start selling internationally without ever having gone to the country. Right. So we saw this with Dr metrics is a company that does technology, analytics, so they’re tracking from all over the world where buyers of consumer electronic products are coming in, and he’s like I keep getting these inquiries from China, you know, can you help me translate the emails, I’m getting and I said you know that we talked it through and I said, well all the questions are the same, why don’t you do a landing page and then you can reuse that and optimize it for search so he ended up doing that and we’re tracking it now to see, you know how that’s going to do for his business, but he ended up doing that into three different languages. Now, so there he can automate the process so that’s, that’s a really exciting change because 95% of the exporters are small and midsize businesses so that’s why I love soft land partners because it’s pulling together a whole network of people that can help these small and midsize businesses that don’t have the full staff. Enter markets and make connections all over the place.
Bill : Oh that’s cool. So then, the second mistake that you mentioned was the idea of buying on on price so when you think about how a company would would sort of, because I would imagine that, depending on a company’s need whether it’s, you know sort of quality, speed, price, you know, whatever that kind of key criteria for their decision will sort of lead them to different solutions but is there a formula that you found or maybe a way process that might help a company understand how to better balance the various variables to make the best decision for themselves in terms of what what resource to use to keep, you know they’re there to keep up to speed on language where they need to within be at their marketing or business.
Wendy : Yes, yes, I’ve got a couple of frameworks that help looking at this one is you start with strategy. Okay so just making the knee jerk reaction to translate doesn’t make sense, you want to look at your corporate strategy, you know, what do you what do you want to do, what are you planning on doing and that drives your marketing strategy, and then your marketing strategy drives your multilingual strategy. So, you know, having translation be a one off, doesn’t make sense. The next place you want to look at is process, if you’ve already got somebody internal, who is going to be your translation project manager and, you know, really large companies will have a whole department that does this, but you want to think about your process and how’s it going to get done. And that’s we, we work with a lot of ad agencies who they want to retain some part of the process or they may want us to do it so we spend a lot of time working with the client the potential client and then the other partners they may have, of what makes the most sense for their customized process, then you look at technology, you know if it’s a short, short translation. You know you need to get, you know you want to do a landing page, and you may not use a lot of technology for that just email the text over and you’re gonna pop it up on your website. Yet today, we are working on a project that is using x live files from a company called pendo.io, you know Pendo I’ve seen them. Yeah, yeah, so they help project managers figure out kind of the user’s journey. So that’s, you know they need a technical file done so how we transfer the file, how we’re going to put it in how we’re going to leverage the, the two files that have the same content and get that done. Yeah, so it’s Pendo file from another client that we’re doing. So, that one, there’s a lot of technology needs on it, even though the copy is really small because it’s going to save a lot of human time later on. So you got your strategy, you got your process, you got your technology and then you got your quality. So these are the four areas we go through. Now on the quality you can use a four by four grid, you know, so if it’s high cost low cost, low cost, high return. Okay and then you put it on there. So if it’s something that’s going to give you a high return, you’re more apt to spend more money on that. If it’s something that’s low cost and low return. You might do it but when you get into high cost and low return. Why bother.
Bill : Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, is this, I would imagine in some circumstances like a website maintenance is also a variable because the, the, whatever the home language is you there’s frequent updating to the website, text and so on or additional text that’s being added, blogs and whatever, you know, might be the added. How much does maintenance for say a midsize company comes in because it’s going to be a being able to outsource maintenance probably adds another level of convenience to, and probably reliability to the process with if you’re outsourcing well.
Wendy : Right, so there’s, there’s a few different ways that we do this. One is on some platforms, we can set up an automatic alert that would come in to us and tell us when something’s been added. And then we can go and do the translation and add it back up. Okay. Another way is if a company doesn’t want all their content updated, They may just drop us an email and tell us hey we’ve released this content. The, the, so that’s kind of, you know, notification how it come in that’s all a process issue. The next way is it for a lot of social media updates, there’s an editorial calendar. And so what we oftentimes will recommend is that you create the content in July, and launch it, you know, or create and launch it in July. And then the translation is done and you launch that in August so there’s a one month delay. And often, that’s fine. And then you’re building time in so it’s not always an emergency to get it done and you’re rushing on that. So that’s you know if somebody has an editorial calendar or even we can do it on a rotating weekly basis, we’ve done that before. And then the third thing is is we’re very excited. This month we launched as some social media packages. So if you know you’re doing a blog, a month, and for content posts and some emails, that’s the starter package and then we have the professional and the serious, and then we can always custom make so then it’s you know how much you’re spending you know how much content you’re creating, and you build it all in.
Bill : Well I suppose to your earlier point on strategy that really fits strategy well because if you want to, you know, penetrate the Latin American market, knowing you have consistent content that is going out in Spanish and Portuguese probably is a really helpful thing to your, your strategy.
Yeah, yeah,
Wendy : Yeah and the metrics are there, I mean the metrics to show it. And not only that it’s there’s resources from the federal and state government that will help you. I mean you probably know about step grants. Sure. Well, we’ve done many translations of websites or marketing material for people who got step grants from their state, right, that will pay for it.
Bill : That’s a great thing to mention so if companies are here in the US, they can use. Step grants as a way to both builds websites and translate them in a new languages there are a variety of you go to trade shows there’s a whole bunch of different uses for first step grants but yeah great resource if you don’t, if you don’t know them, so that the last mistake that you mentioned that people make is that they, they hire the wrong translator, and so how does, how does someone know that they’ve got the right translator, you know, what are the questions that that somebody should ask whether they’re coming through an agency or or are independent, how do you how do you know,
Wendy : I think you want to make sure that they’re fully bilingual, they’ve got some experience in working in your subject matter that they will only translate into their native language. So even if you’re, you, you know, so I learned Spanish as a second language it’s gotten weaker because I’m not talking all the time I’m, you know, speaking business English, but I would never translate into Spanish if I got good enough to be a linguist, then I would only translate into English. So you really want to be careful of that. I mentioned subject matter expertise relationship. Do you like working with the person. Are they willing to take feedback, because a good translator is like a good writer, you know if it’s something that doesn’t ring true. Then will they take feedback will they remember it, will they incorporate it in the future. Test. References references or testimonials. Let me say something else. And then it depends. So we got a translation that somebody said oh this is a French translation and we keep getting comments that it’s really bad. And I was like, Okay, you picked an individual translator what’s going on well, they pick somebody who spoke Haitian Creole French, and it was for use in Canada 4000 miles off. Yes, exactly, exactly. So when we looked at it, you know, our first question in the strategy is who’s the audience who’s gonna who’s going to be reading this translation. So you know and that’s the benefit, I mean as a buyer, you don’t know those questions, right so if you don’t know the questions then you’re better off going to an agency that can help guide you with that.
Bill : There’s not one Spanish there’s not one French.
Wendy : And you know even if you do a globalization, you know like if I do a globalization for Spanish, I wouldn’t use somebody from Mexico or Puerto Rico because their languages to Americanize, but we have a really good translator from Argentina, and if it’s going to go globalized. People love his translations.
Bill : It’s somewhat like, I’m just trying to my own reference to this is it’s somewhat like when companies are doing surveys trying to find in the USA, you know, they try to find the average American and they go for years that was sort of certain cities or towns in the Midwest, Des Moines was one and I think Minneapolis was one and whatnot but that was, you know, are you, is it somewhat the same where you’re sort of looking for somebody that has that the, whether it’s the life experiences that are representative or that, or is it purely just a language, is it purely just their, their ability to understand Spanish as an example.
Wendy : No, no, because they have to have subject matter expertise so you’ve got to have somebody from the right location. You’ve got to have somebody that has expertise writing and like the Carlos from Argentina who I was talking about. He’s got a PhD in international relations and a master’s in theology. I mean his grammar is accurate, and I questioned him one real underachiever is a real underachiever. I mean, and those are the kinds of people that we’re working with, I mean that we take the time to figure them out but they’re fascinating people too, they’re very very educated. That’s unbelievable. Yeah, but I do remember something about the Midwest, it used to be call centers.
Bill : Yeah they quite often they would use call center people from Midwest for call centers because they didn’t have a deep south accent, they didn’t have a New York accent, you know that that kind of thing so yeah that’s in India
Wendy : and India and the Philippines now. Yeah, thank goodness, we’re more open to accents now.
Bill : So, so obviously you, you’ve had a great deal of experience in this area. Is there a, maybe a case study or maybe one or two clients who really feel got it right, and that we could use them as example and maybe talk through the process they went through to, whether it was localized or internationalized there are I am sorry or globalize their communication.
Wendy : So let’s talk about context I brought them up earlier because I think they’re a really good example. They. So they made a bunch of acquisitions around the world, and they have a ton of different products, but some products aren’t needed in other places, you know, in certain places so they don’t sell them there. So we started out with, you know, right now they had all these websites with different messages so they had no global presence and as part of a brand you want to build on that because that gives you more credibility. So they wanted to consolidate a website that had a clear message look and feel and take that across all. They didn’t want to translate the whole website because they weren’t selling certain things there. So it was very, just for the English alone, it was a very complex build of, you know, if you go into the certain location, what products are going to come out, what’s navigation, how do you name it. So when the, you know, so they worked with an agency to figure that out, and then what we wanted to know was which pages, and which products were going to be translated and tie into this Global website. So they ended up doing a big spreadsheet, and just axing off you know so it was a grid of what products across the top what languages, and then exit off, so then that was the strategy, the process was this we pulled the content in translated it and then pushed it out and the technology that we use in the platform they had was a little bit of a problem because it didn’t pull down the headers the footers, the descriptions, the call out buttons the call to actions, and we didn’t realize those were going to be missed. So what we did was then take those and translate them and make sure that they were graphically appropriate on everything, and they were very happy they took the content before we uploaded it and send it off to all the different markets to have in country people review it, they had minor edits, which, you know, it’s like writing everybody’s gonna have that it’s on something and she said that she was very happy with the translations that we did, and that it is timely, and it was predictable because it was a huge thing that they had senior management saying get this done, and there was a lot of moving parts with not a lot of people working on it, but Michelle who worked there, did, did a bang up job and communicating and keeping everybody aligned.
Bill : So having that person who acts as the project lead or project manager on the client side sounds like a really important attribute to kind of keep the project moving along.
Wendy : She was the one marketing person or one global marketing person so she was also looking for teammates that could really help, but stay within her budget. Yeah, yeah cuz there’s not usually somebody who’s identified to handle translation. So that’s why you’d go to an agency, particularly if you’re getting multiple languages, because then if questions come in on one language on the original content that manager is going to make sure that it gets to all the other ones. That makes sense.
Bill : And yeah, that’s really cool, so is when you sort of think about them. The pair process was what really made it work really smooth and having that point person was a key component. Yeah, yeah. Cool,
Wendy : yeah yeah and I mean we’ve written about this before. If you send off to translation, don’t send off and make yourself unaccessible, you know, make yourself accessible for questions because that just holds up the whole process. You know like we did a tagline for a hospital before, and it was, it’s all about getting better. It’s the hospital providing better services, but it’s also the patient’s getting better. It’s a double meaning it works really well for a hospital. Well we sent the translation off to the Haitian Creole translator, and the original translator read it as it’s all about the hospital, providing better services, and the editor said now I think it’s about the patient getting better. They were both right. But in Haitian Creole you had to have a subject, you couldn’t drop the subject off. So we went back to the hospital. And we had to ask, you know, look, you’re trying to translate this, you can’t just drop the subject and get the double meaning. Which way do you want to go.
Bill : Yeah, and having that responsive partner. Yeah.
Wendy : Having a good agency who’s going to know those then you can feel like you’re getting the quality and the message out that you want. Now rather than an untrained translator, we’ll just say well I’ll just leave it at this so they may not realize the double innuendos or you know they may take liberties and say well let’s change it a bit we’ve had that a lot with distributors internationally, who handle the translation and they take it from a marketing message which is all about benefits, change it to a features message.
Bill : That’s fantastic. Yeah. So are there, it’s, you know, just thinking of companies that are, are looking for help in this area, Are there any other things that they should consider in terms of, you know how to do it well what, you know, sort of, have any other best practices that they should consider in terms of globalizing or or localizing.
Wendy : Yeah So think through what needs to be done, Um, think about the navigation, I mean you spend a lot of time with the buyers journey when you’re doing a website. And, you know, if you do your drop down and you list all your languages and English, they’re not gonna find it, make sure it works I was on a site today and they had four languages, up there, and they were translated so that looked really good and I speak a little French so I clicked on French to see, you know what the page looked like and I couldn’t get to it other times I’ll click on a page, and the headers and the footers and everything doesn’t work right so rather than just keeping it in the same navigation of your English, maybe think about a different landing page that you can do that would be fully translated so it looks good and thoughtful, to the to the to the reader.
Bill : Cool. So how, how would people get a hold of you if they were interested in getting some help,
Wendy : check left to, we provide a free call console or a free multilingual marketing assessment so you can certainly go to our website which is rapporttranslations.com I am all over LinkedIn, we’re posting fun stuff all the time so if you follow me on LinkedIn, you’ll you’ll hear today’s national pina colada day or international pina colada day I don’t know which one. So have your pina coladas today. It’s not too late. Yeah, although when this airs who knows it will be nationally could be different colored shoe day or September 30 is international translation day. So we have all sorts of fun things going out about words and cultures and, you know, so, certainly Wendy Pease translation expert you’ll find me on LinkedIn, certainly follow me.
Bill : Awesome. And, Yeah, and we’ll certainly put a link to your website in the description for both podcasts, and the webinar. So let’s talk about softland partners you brought it up earlier, you’ve gotten, you’ve been involved for the last couple of months and you very generously came on board as the Boston chapter leader. About a month ago. So just, you know, are there certain hopes that you have for the Boston chapter, what would you like to see happen there. In terms of the the internationalization and soft landing community in Boston.
Wendy : Yes, that’s right now, there’s no one recognized group for where glow, the global oriented people can go, so we’ve got the different. Now the French, American Chamber of Commerce, the British, American Chamber of Commerce, the Latin American, but you get certain segments of group that are going there and once a year they do the global economic update, and all the globally minded people go there. And so I’ve talked to a couple of other people that I’m trying to get involved in Softland partners and others who have I’ve involved about let’s. Let’s make this a community because it’s a fun community when you pull the global minded people together. So I think that’s one thing. And the second thing is there’s such a huge opportunity for small and mid sized companies to export and becoming an accidental exporter is more common. And if you need connections in you know in Rome or in Istanbul or wherever. I love how you’re building out this global network of people, and you know the slack communication channel for all of us to share input because, you know people want to help and if we can help companies go international, builds our global community. And that’s our vision as, you know, is a peaceful and prosperous world and we want to help on the communications part, but I think if we can drive global trade and relations and all that, it’s, it’s just better for all of us.
Bill : That’s fantastic. Yeah, it’s actually interesting that Australian Government recently put out some statistics that, of course they have, they do a lot of work to support companies from Australia. Exporting and then also inbound companies, but their statistics tell them that 70% of the companies they support fail to enter the market so a lot of false attempts or a lot of failed attempts at yeah and it just seems like that. And as I sort of shared that around a little bit, particularly with folks in trading investment they say yeah, that’s, that’s about right. That’s what we see as well
Wendy : 70% Of the companies fail in launching where
Bill : so companies that are internationalizing and entering new markets. 70% of them fail so 30% success Wow Really Yeah really. But the number one reason that the Australian Government found that they were failing, was the ability to find good partners. And so that’s it I think it really tried to reinforce what you were saying with statistics was that, you know that the up there is it seems like there’s a big gap in terms of whether it’s the competent or ethical service of globalizing companies and really an opportunity to help those companies would really remove the friction to finding the best and most reliable partners and I would imagine COVID creates an additional opportunity there, where you can’t travel is less accessible. So you’re, you still have the nationalizing goals that need to rely on partners becomes possible even even greater and. And so having a trusted network, both for the companies internationalizing but for all of us that serve them, having people that we can refer that make us look good. Yeah, it’s, it’s an important part to our own, you know, whether it’s our own success our client success, ultimately they’re tied together, I suppose.
Wendy : Right, right. And what’s interesting about the 70% I’ve never heard that statistic, but what I’ve heard is so it must be that 30% that do go international, and are successful they are, they make more money, they bring more money to the bottom line, they pay higher salaries and they have higher customer satisfaction, you know, and then the balance of trade with the currency risk, you know when one economy is down and another one’s up you balance that off so yeah let’s make more companies successful so they can perform better.
Bill : Exactly, yeah, no I mean you, to your point earlier about sort of creating a more peaceful and financially independent world, certainly, you know it changing that statistic or improving that statistic goes a long way to that we were in so I guess last year too is there’s so much money right now that’s going into getting helping companies internationalized right governments are either helping on the export side or on the receiving side they’re giving tax abatements and incentives and whatnot to, you know come to Massachusetts or come to, you know whatever jurisdiction. But there’s almost no money being spent to help them stick.
Wendy : Wow.
Bill : Right, so it’s, we actually have a marked a new marketing piece that says stick the landing, just like a gymnast.
Wendy : Stick the landing, which is great, which is also why all the incubators that are in soft land partners are natural network and help people to stick the landing, that’s fantastic.
Bill : It will do, maybe to close up is there, kind of one neat relationship that you’d point to that, that you’ve created so far and, in, in getting involved as, whether it’s on the, you know, a potential resource for your clients or somebody that maybe is a good lead source or connection source for you.
Wendy : Yeah. Tim resent us. Yeah, yeah, here he and I had a fabulous conversation and we’re actually working on putting a speaking engagement together. Because we can really help with companies, exporting because he does the legal side. He’s a lawyer but they don’t do law here they do law, and all the other countries. So I was really impressed with him.
Bill : Amazing they’re firm yeah Osborne Clarke they have like 2000 attorneys in Europe. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, huge firm, for sure.
Wendy : Yeah. Yeah. And then the other, there was a couple of the, the global speed networking event, so there was a couple people that attended that the next ones on July 31. Yeah, so I hope you can attend that because I think that’s a good place for soft land partners to actually have conversations one on one conversations and I think it’s a good place to introduce people to soft land partners. I think they’re a nice, nice relationship together.
Bill : Oh, that’s great. Yeah, no, let’s make sure we share that with everybody, maybe on the Slack channel too.
Wendy : Okay,
Bill : Well good. Are there any is there any closing thoughts any things that we should make sure
Wendy : I wasn’t done on the people that I’ve met. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed meeting you and I’ve been impressed with the community that you’ve been able to build and moderate and develop and really keep engaged so hats off to you, I think you’ve done a great job.
Bill : Much, much more work to go but thank you for sure.
Wendy : Celebrate the moment right. I’m like you know we see what needs to be done.
Bill : Well, you’re by the water at least I’m just I’m stuck in the office.
Wendy : I’ll just reach my hand over and splash into the cooler
Bill : and get a nice cold beer or something.
Wendy : Yeah, meanwhile I’m sitting in my dining room sweating.
Bill : Yeah this tropical coming through is making it really hot, for sure. Yes, yes. Good. Thank you, Wendy, this has been fantastic. The information you shared, I think it’s going to be great for all the companies and individuals listening so thank you so much for taking the time.
Wendy : All right, Thank you, pleasure talking to you.
Bill : Thanks.